In the Copenhagen Accord of December 2009, developed countries agreed to provide start-up finance for adaptation in developing countries and expressed the ambition to scale this up to $100 billion per year by 2020. The financial mechanisms to deliver this support have to be tailored to country...

With banking sectors worldwide still suffering from the effects of the financial crisis, public discussion of plans to place toxic assets in one or more bad banks has gained steam in recent weeks. The following paper presents a plan how governments can efficiently relieve ailing banks from toxic...

Since the summer of 2007, participants in financial markets have been confronted by a crisis of their own making. In order to prevent the recurrence of a similar crisis in the future, the G-20 nations, at their finance summit in Washington on 15 November 2008, resolved to "ensure that all...

With banking sectors worldwide still suffering from the effects of the financial crisis, public discussion of plans to place toxic assets in one or more bad banks has gained steam in recent weeks. The following paper presents a plan how governments can efficiently relieve ailing banks from toxic...

Since the summer of 2007, participants in financial markets have been confronted by a crisis of their own making. In order to prevent the recurrence of a similar crisis in the future, the G-20 nations, at their finance summit in Washington on 15 November 2008, resolved to "ensure that all...

This paper studies the association between a country's level of financial development and firms' employment growth. We employ an incomplete contract model for evaluating this association. The model proposes that a high level of financial development affects the employment of firms with low...

We argue that a financial transaction tax complements financial market regulation. With the tax, governments have an additional instrument at hand to influence trading activity. FTT aims to reduce regulatory arbitrage, flash trading, overactive portfolio management, excessive leverage and...

We investigate whether or not banks play a positive role in the ownership structure of European listed firms. We distinguish between banks and other institutional investors as shareholders and examine empirically the relationship between financial institution ownership and the performance of the...

The success of joint liability programs depends on nature and composition of borrowing groups. Group formation is a costly process and in our model these costs vary with the social identity of group partners. We show that risk heterogeneity in a borrowing group may arise due to the social...

The paper focuses on the effects of three different internal bank ratings - Risk-, Property- and Creditworthiness-Rating - on the loan maturity. We use a sample of about 5,000 loans given to sole proprietors and corporate borrowers by two German banks from January 2003 till July 2005. The...